NetScout Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: NTCT)'s purchase of Psytechnics Ltd. , announced Monday, enables creation of better tools for service providers and enterprises to monitor the quality of video services and, in particular, telepresence offerings. (See NetScout to Buy Psytechnics.)

Psytechnics is a BT spinoff that had a reputation for its technology in the voice and video performance management realm. According to Steve Shalita, VP of marketing, Psytechnics went beyond the MOS, or Mean Opinion Score, typically used to measure VoIP quality to develop its own algorithms that look at the transmission characteristics of voice and video and measure how the network is performing in a number of different ways to determine quality.

NetScout plans to integrate Psytechnics' technology to add deep voice and video service management capabilities to its overall performance management platform.

“It’s going to be a pretty powerful combination,” says Jim Frey, managing research director for analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates. “There are not a lot of good existing mature tools in the marketplace for managing video especially across multi-vendor deployments. There are good tools for individual vendors, but no good independent technology for setting up monitoring consistency.”

Why this matters
Videoconferencing and telepresence, in particular, are moving out of the single vendor/carrier category and more toward multi-vendor solutions as a necessity for a market that needs to mature. In that broader arena, independent ways of determining the end-to-end quality of a video signal become crucial to managing the end user experience and making these sometimes-expensive video services earn their keep.

For large video deployments, service providers don’t want to rely on single vendor or single technology solutions, says analyst Frey, but need things that work in the broader network context, which NetScout is trying to create with this acquisition.

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